Yesterday evening I had the pleasure to be part of the first Spoken Black Girl magazine Black Voices in Publishing Panel at Civic Hall. We had a great time and it was livestreamed on Facebook (see the Source link below)! I have come to learn that I use many many hand gestures when I speak. Never have to worry about that on my podcast, so we learned something.

Anywho, thanks to all involved especially Tamika for doing the AV, Rowana for organizing, Driadonna and Raquel for being brilliant and all who attended. Hope to see more of these to come to encourage PoCs in publishing!

I was telling a podcast guest this just yesterday: There’s very little that I won’t say to someone’s face. This is a positive and a negative. I haven’t always been this way but the more you know, grow, and learn, the less you may be inclined to play by certain rules you feel are destined to make you a performance artist in your everyday life.

Making my way to the next landing I saw the largesse of an oil painting of the Pawnee Table Creek Treaty of 1857 by William Haskell Coffin. In this painting, Native American men dance in an open field wearing nothing more than headdresses and loincloth of sorts. Some carry hatchets, others spears. The settlers, all white, stare stone faced, dare I say questionably, at those in celebration. The imagery itself disturbed me knowing the broad strokes of the history between colonialists and Native Americans (short version, the first group steadily massacred the second).

On a table to the far right of this painting was a copy of the actual Pawnee Treaty of 1857. If the visual didn’t incite pause, the treaty itself had me stupefied.

The #SupportWNDB campaign has kept me a tad bit busy these past few weeks (and for the coming weeks until it ends). And if you haven't heard about it after it trended on Twitter here's a bit of background on the initiatives of We Need Diverse Books.

The lack of diversity in books specifically has had a snowball effect since BookCon's lack of White, straight, male authors on a panel that could've easily contained people of the non-majority. Since then more statistics and essays and posts and cries for diversity have been provided in print, online, and spoken about at conferences (not just in private discussions). The "debate" of diversity is not going away and that's a good thing.